the iodine dressing was open and weepy and raw. Ursula was no longer at the clinic, and this confused Lili. But she was too tired and too softened with drug to consider it further. She had once asked Frau Krebs about Ursula, and she had rearranged Lili’s pillows and said, “Don’t worry about her. Everything is fine now.”
Greta could visit only a few hours each afternoon. A rule, instituted by Professor Bolk and enforced by the metallic voice of Frau Krebs, banned visitors in the mornings and evenings. These were the times when the girls of the clinic were to be alone but together, as if their condition and trouble were a seal of camaraderie that outsiders couldn’t share. And so each day Greta would visit from just after lunch, when Lili’s lip would still hold a spot of potato soup, until late afternoon, when the shadows grew long and Lili’s head would loll into her chest.
Lili looked forward to the sight of Greta entering the glassed-in
“As soon as we get you out of here,” Greta would say, settling into a recliner, her legs up on the long white cushion, “I’m going to take you straight back to Copenhagen and let you have a look around.”
Greta had been promising this since she arrived from Paris: the train and ferry back to Denmark; reopening the apartment in the Widow House, which had remained shuttered for years; a spree in the private dressing room of Fonnesbech’s department store.
“But why can’t we go now?” Lili would ask. Not once in five years had she or Greta returned to Copenhagen. Lili had a vague memory of Einar instructing the shippers, with their sleeves rolled to their elbows, to handle carefully the crate that held his unframed canvases. She remembered watching Greta empty the drawers of the pickled-ash wardrobe into a little trunk with leather hinges that Lili never saw again.
“You’re not quite finished here,” Greta would remind Lili.
“Why not?”
“Only a little more time. Then we can go home.” How pretty Greta was, in her paneled skirt and her high-heel boots, resting next to Lili. Greta had never loved anyone more than her, Lili knew. Now-now that even her government papers claimed she was Lili Elbe-she felt certain Greta wouldn’t change. It was what got Lili through it, through the lonely nights in the hospital room beneath the heavy blanket, through the bouts of pain that sneaked up and mugged her like a thief. Lili was always changing, but not Greta, never Greta.
Professor Bolk would sometimes join Lili and Greta, standing over them, Greta’s legs stretched out on the recliner, Lili in her chair. “Won’t you sit with us?” Greta would ask, repeating her request three or four times, but the professor never stopped long enough to take the cup of tea that Lili always poured for him.
“It seems to be working,” Professor Bolk said one day.
“Why do you say that?” Greta asked.
“Take a look at her. Doesn’t she look well to you?”
“She does, but she’s getting anxious to be done with this,” said Greta, standing to meet Professor Bolk.
“She’s becoming quite a pretty young lady,” he said.
Lili watched them, their legs near her face, making her feel like a child.
“She’s been here over three months,” Greta said. “She’s beginning to think about life outside the clinic. She’s anxious to head out into the-”
“Stop talking about me like I’m not here,” Lili interrupted. It spilled from her mouth, the angry little interruption, as her food had done during the first druggy days after the operations.
“We weren’t,” Greta said, kneeling. And then, “No, you’re right. How do you feel, Lili? Tell me. How do you feel today?”
“I feel fine except for the pain, but that’s getting better. Frau Krebs and Nurse Hannah both say it’ll ease up and then I can go home.” Lili now sat forward in her wicker wheelchair. She steadied her hands and tried to pull herself up.
“Don’t stand,” Greta said. “Not unless you’re ready.”
Lili tried again, but her arms couldn’t manage. She’d become so hollow, a nearly weightless girl emptied out by both illness and her surgeon’s knife. “I’ll be ready soon,” Lili finally said. “Maybe next week. We’re moving back to Copenhagen, Professor Bolk. Has Greta told you we’re returning to Copenhagen?”
“That’s what I understand.”
“And we’re moving into our old apartment in the Widow House. You’ll have to come visit us. Do you know Copenhagen? We have a marvelous view of the Royal Theatre’s dome, and if you open the window you can smell the harbor.”
“But, Lili,” Greta said, “you won’t be ready to leave next week.”
“If I keep on improving like this, then why not? Tomorrow I’ll take my first steps again. Tomorrow let’s try to walk a little in the park.”
“Don’t you remember, Lili?” the professor said, holding his papers against his chest. “There’s another operation.”
“Another operation?”
“Just one more,” Greta said.
“Whatever for? Haven’t you done everything already?” Lili couldn’t say the words, but she was thinking: But haven’t you already restored my ovaries and removed my gonads? No, she could never say it. How humiliating it was, even with Greta.
“Just one last procedure,” Professor Bolk said. “To remove your-”
And Lili-who was no older and no younger than her present mood, who was the ghost of a girl, both ageless and unaging, with adolescent naivete erasing the decades of another man’s experience, who each morning cupped her swelling breasts like an overanxious girl praying for her first menstruation-closed her eyes against the shame. Professor Bolk was informing her that down there, beneath the gauze and the brown iodine dressing that looked like the watered-down gravy Einar had endured during the war, just up from her fresh, still-healing wound, lay one last roll of skin that belonged to Einar.
“All I need to do is remove it and refold the-” Lili couldn’t bear the details, and so instead she looked to Greta, whose lap was filled with an open notebook. Greta was sketching Lili at this moment, looking from her to the notebook and back, and when Greta’s eyes met Lili’s, Greta set down her pencil and said, “She’s right. Can’t you hurry up the next operation, Professor Bolk? What’s the wait?”
“I don’t think she’s ready. She isn’t strong enough yet.”
“I think she is,” Greta said.
They continued to argue, while Lili shut her eyes and imagined Einar as a boy on the lichen rock watching Hans return a shot with his tennis racquet. She thought of Henrik’s moist hand in hers at the Artists Ball. And the heat of Carlisle’s eyes on her early that damp morning at the market. And Greta, her eyes narrowing into concentration, as Lili posed on the lacquer trunk. “Do it now,” she said softly.
Professor Bolk and Greta stopped. “What did you say?” he asked.
“Did you say something?” Greta said.
“Please just do it now.”
Outside in the back-park the new girls, whom Lili didn’t recognize, were gathering their books and their blankets and were reentering the clinic for the evening. The willows were sweeping the lawn of the Municipal Women’s Clinic, and beyond the girls a rabbit dashed into a gooseberry shrub. The current of the Elbe held the flat- bottomed freighters, and, across the river, the sun hit the copper roofs of Dresden and the great, almost silver dome of the Frauenkirche.
She shut her eyes and dreamed, somewhere in her future, of crossing the square of Kongens Nytorv, in the shadow of the statue of King Christian V, and the only person in the world who would stop and stare would be the handsome stranger whose heartswell would force him to touch Lili’s hand and profess his love.
When Lili opened her eyes, she saw that Greta and the professor were looking down toward the end of the
